[SGVLUG] Xen and nVidia...

[John E. Kreznar]

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"Emerson, Tom (*IC)" <Tom.Emerson at wbconsultant.com> writes:

> ...doesn't work (per nVidia)

> My new laptop has an nVidia card, so naturally I want to use the
> vendor-supplied driver, but it seems it won't work with a "xen" enabled
> kernel.  The (open)Suse wiki, however, has an article on how to patch
> the binary driver so that it will work, but that seems a bit dicey to
> me...

> So I'm looking for an alternative, and what comes to mind is to somehow
> accomplish the following:

>   1) when booting with the "default" kernel, us the accellerated nvidia
> driver
>   2) when booting with the "xen" kernel, revert to the standard VESA/fb
> driver

> Any thoughts on how I would go about this?

Why not use different root partitions in the two cases?  The kernel
command line parameter root= selects the right partition for the right
kernel and can be programmed in the lilo or grub configuration file.
The X configuration parameters would be different in the two
partitions as appropriate.

I wouldn't be surprised if this would simplify other aspects of
running both xen and non-xen on the same machine as well.

If this results in wasteful duplication, maybe both partitions could
be mounted at boot time, one on an "auxroot" mount point, with
symbolic links between identical subdirectories.  Naturally, other
major parts of the system, such as /usr, /var, and /home, could be
separately mounted and identical between the two systems.

- -- 
 John E. Kreznar jek at ininx.com 9F1148454619A5F08550 705961A47CC541AFEF13

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